First Video Game Console Ever: The Brown Box - Rerez

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This interview and accompanying article took place in December 2013

It's 1967 and the first self-titled album from The Doors is released, Texas Instruments invents the first handheld calculator and Our World, the first live international satellite television production, airs with the very first public performance from The Beatles of their soon to be number one song All You Need is Love. This was a busy year and for gamers one invention becomes one of the most important events to ever happen. I was invited to the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, ON to look at this very invention. The first video game console ever made, the Brown Box.

Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch invented what is now known as the Brown Box. The first multiplayer, multi program video game system for use on home televisions. “Some of the earlier versions actually have more games than this but this was the one that was actually taken and modeled and became the [Magnavox] Odyssey, which was the first game machine that beat out the Atari 2600,” said Michael Thomasson, video game historian and owner of the Brown Box model on display. Released in 1972 the Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercially sold video game console. Designed by Ralph Baer the system features were very similar to the Brown Box’s and while most people believe the first video game created for home systems was Pong it actually wasn't.

The Brown Box had a selection of games built into it but one of them would start the video game industry as we know it. “There are seven games that were built into the Brown Box, the first one is Ping Pong,” explains Thomasson, “Magnavox had an event showing off what was going to be the Odyssey. Nolan Bushnell and two fellow employees from Ampex, where he worked at the time, had actually gone to the show to see what was going on. For years Nolan Bushnell denied the fact that they had actually seen this in action before they came up with Pong.” Thomasson went on to explain that it was only after being confronted with the guest log book from that show with his signature in it that Bushnell admitted he did actually did see Ping Pong on the Brown Box that day but that he wasn't that impressed with it.

Ping Pong on the Brown Box isn't exactly like the famous Pong that Nolan Bushnell and his company Atari would make popular. Their version had some changes. The Brown Box has three dials and one button on the controller. Two dials control your horizontal and vertical, allowing you to move your square or paddle anywhere on the screen and the button was used to serve the ball. The third dial was called English allowing you to alter the path of the ball by curving its trajectory. This makes the Brown Box controllers and the game itself more challenging. What Atari brought to the table with Pong was a simplification of the controls. Now your paddle was limited to vertical movement controlled by a single dial and the game was engaged when you inserted a quarter in the arcade cabinet or pressed the start button on the home console. Unlike the Brown Box version, depending where on the paddle the ball hit it would alter the path of the ball bouncing it off at an angle eliminating the need for the English dial all together. And to add one more feature a score was introduced. While the Brown Box was not made for public consumption the Magnavox Odyssey was but it didn't sell well. Atari would famously start to release arcade units and home consoles and achieve massive success for doing so. There came a point when you could find countless clones of pong from several manufacturers. The 1970s saw the start of a brand new market — the video game industry.

Magnavox would go on to sue countless companies for infringing on the patents related to Ralph Baer's early work and every suit was settled or ended with them winning. While it would seem that the Magnavox Odyssey and the Brown Box would never make their way into the consciousness of the consumers the way that Atari did Ralph Baer would turn around and do exactly what Atari did to him years earlier. In 1974 Atari would release a very unpopular arcade game called Touch Me, a four button game that played a randomised sequence of lights and harsh sounds that the player would have to replicate. The game builds up the sequence and difficulty the longer the players play the game. In 1978 Ralph Baer and Howard J. Morrison released the exact same game but they added colored buttons, made the sound sequence harmonic and they made it way smaller and portable. And to this day Simon is still considered one of the greatest games ever produced.

The Brown Box and even the Odyssey never reached the recognition they deserved. And while most modern gamers today may not know the history of these systems they benefit from their legacy in every game that they play.

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